The Garden Path Read Online Free PDF Page A

hiding the fact that she had fallen in love with the place as quickly as Susannah had, was meant to ruin any pleasure Edwin might find in the purchase. Oh yes, she was a terrible bitch, but she felt she had to pay him back for tricking her into marriage.
    Edwin had tricked her into marriage, when she was nineteen and he twenty-four, by pretending to be interesting. He kept it up for an entire year, from the day they met until the wedding. By the time they were married he was thin and tired and nervous and unable to go on with it—the pretense. It crumbled on their Caribbean honeymoon, when he spent long hours simply lying in the sun, and stopped talking to her in restaurants while they waited for their crayfish and their mango pie and their exotic rum drinks served in hollowed-out pineapples, and while the steel band played with a black intensity that made Rosie sad. She thought Edwin was tired of her already, that she had begun to bore him, and she cried into her pillow every night after they made love and he went to sleep. She thought he had decided she was good for only one thing. It took her months to discover that he was simply tired of being fascinating—of taking her to the theater and the opera, of telling her funny stories from his college days, of asking intelligent questions about gardening, of promising to take her to see the gardens of England and France and Italy, of devouring Newsweek and the Sunday Times so he could wow her with his knowledge of the world. He settled, as if with a grunt, into the cold dullness that was natural to him. The repetitive acts that she came to associate with him—the back and forth swimming, the long sessions pushing Susannah on the swing, the tolerance for those daily drives up and down Route 91, even his incredible but, in the end, tedious endurance in bed—were, she decided, his way of winding himself up for life. He was always in danger of running down. He was a taciturn, introverted, selfish, incurious man who wanted most of all to be left alone. If she had a meatball for every time he said that all he asked was a little peace and quiet she could open a restaurant.
    She must have been, at nineteen, just the kind of wife Edwin wanted—young, pathetically naive, and upwardly mobile. She loved her parents dearly, and she loved her old Nonna Anna, who was still living with them, blind and arthritic but funny and full of beans. She was fond of Liliano’s Garden Center, too, and she was perfectly content to work there on weekends all through high school and, when she graduated, to work full-time, either behind the cash register or outside taking care of the plants and shrubs. But she didn’t want to spend her life there. She had grand ideas, vaguely incorporating an estate not unlike Silvergate. She wanted to be the grande dame ordering the viburnum and the wisteria, not the person who delivered them and sent the bill. At this utterly inane period in her life, she met Edwin. Edwin was a clerk in a law firm in Providence that summer. He was in his last year of law school at Harvard. He used to drive his fat and patronizing mother to Liliano’s to pick out flats of boring annuals, or he used to stop by for bags of fertilizer and grass seed. Mrs. Mortimer fancied herself a gardener because every spring she had her favorite son, dear Edwin, plant the perimeter of her lawns with lavish borders of red and white petunias and impatiens and salvia, outlined in blue ageratum for a patriotic effect. By the end of the summer, these garishly florabundant plots, cultivated and fertilized and pinched back every weekend by dutiful Edwin—who gardened in bathing trunks so he would tan—were undeniably an impressive sight. So, incidentally, was Edwin.
    â€œYou should see my mother’s garden,” he said to Rosie one day when she was selling him a length of garden hose. He was in his bathing trunks and a T-shirt. His legs were long and